Now bear with me ~ I am posting this in general discussion. It started out as a response to one LBN thread I was reading...

I've been very hestitant about making the entire force of our complaint against the war rest on the fact that no WMDs have been found. The force of criticism should be on the issue of "immanent threat." Why couldn't we work multilaterally, convince the world of our position, exhaust diplomatic options, work with the United Nations instead of against them, and thuse engage in an operation in Iraq that was safer, more efficient, less costly and more effective? The answer is because we said that there was a "clear and present" thread to the United States. The word that was used, was "immanent." This is the part of the tale that has been completely and utterly unsubstantiated.

I remember when we went to war, I had to remind myself that I actually did believe that Sadaam a) absolutely wanted to obtain whatever weapons he could and b) probably had WMDs, specifically chemical weapons leftover from when we armed him with them the first time. So I tried to not base my criticism of the war on the claim that Sadaam didn't have weapons. Instead my criticism of the war was that it was rash and wreckless, needlessly putting American children in harms way for a war that wasn't about security, wasn't about democracy, but was about US geo-political interests and profitmaking -- which is the key reason why we were motivated to go it alone, becuase we don't want to share.

I wouldn't be suprised if weapons or unassembled material for making weapons were eventually found, and not the planted variety either. To me that would seem consistent with Sadaam's regime. However, they will not be many, and they will not constitute and immanent threat to anything, and that is where the heart of our criticism should lie. Our criticism should be based on the fact that your brother, my neighbor, her daughter is dead, blown apart and guts spilled out in the desert of a foreign land and it was NEEDLESS AND WRECKLESS AND WANTON. We flipped of the rest of the world, alienating our allies, and we invaded with no genuine commitment to lasting peace or democracy in the country - we simply came in to take what we could take, and fuck the towelheads if they get in the way.

This must be the bulk of our protest. If we blindly focus on the appearance that our position against the war is vindicated by the absence of weapons, what happens when/if weapons are legitimately found? The war will still have been wrong, but why? The answer I believe is decribed above. Democratic talking points on the war should be: Needless and Wreckless to act in the manner that we did, a testiment to Bush's needless and wreckless doctrine of preemption.

It needs to be pointed out that regardless at this point if they find them, they told us they KNEW they were there and that the KNEW WHERE THEY WERE. It is becoming clearer and clearer that they didn't know anything of the sort. They had suspicions AT BEST. Do we as Americans stand for the killing of a bunch of people over a suspicion?

The members of the administration like Wolfowitz who served on the original Team B or who (Cheney, Rumsfeld) saw that it provided faulty intelligence estimates should never have invoked it again. Exaggeration of threats and the psychic invention of threats by politically motivated "analysts" is the history of Team B type exercises.

The idiots that use this method argue the absence of evidence to argue _for_ existence. In the 70's Wolfowitz was part of a team that argued the absence of evidence that the Soviets had advanced non-acoustic submarine detection systems, as well as huge production of Soviet bombers, which was made more frightening because Team B also considered the Soviets culturally predisposed to use nuclear weapons. This time Wolfowitz and his minions used the absence of WMD's, as reported by the UN inspectors, to argue their existance.

BUT, the problem with all thoughtful critique is that average Americans apparently don't think much when they make decisions. Rather they let their "feelings" guide them. Consequently, rational arguments about WMD's and imminent threats don't matter, but playground rules do. It was OK to beat up Saddam and his country simply because he could be painted as a bully.

The argument against war is that it isn't justified for reasons A, B, C, and so on. The argument for war was that Iraq's having WMDs made it a good idea for us to simply invade. The absence of WMDs, then, shows that they had a faulty premise to accompany faulty reasoning.

I agree that it's important not to base vindication solely on that one element.

and too bad it can be routed by simply screeching, 'we're under attack by 'terrorists' out to destroy our way of life' and here are some grainy satelitte photos we have obtained proving it!!!!

Let's no forget that this was also used by Clinton and there is 'consistency' in US foreign policy since the end of the Cold War regardless of the Party occupying it and a major re-think should take place

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